AT THE HEART OF THINGS  -  CHANCE

Eureka!  I think I've discovered a really big deal.  Nothing less than why the human sex urge is so powerful. Sometimes you think those who state "I rather be dead than live without sex" are just kidding.  Maybe not.
 

Now the reason - people are simply afraid of the unknown.  In general they hate risk and chancey propositions.  Speaking of riskphobia, the first disciples of Jesus where always asking dumb questions re their future prospects for money, fame, whatever when they walked 

down the road with the Master.  Of course, the Roman crosses planted here and there near the roads did nothing to help allay their fears.  Anyway, humans surely are security hounds and most of the time flee a risk like the plague.
 

Anyway, what man would commit himself to a till-one- of-us-dies relationship with a woman, many times the gal you just met the month before, if he did not have a sexual drive whose cup overfloweth.  Same thing from the gal's viewpoint, even.  And everyone remembers what
happened to Uncle Harry's marriage.  And add to the inevitable death and taxes the cost of feeding three or four hungry, yappy mouths.  So, even if your super duper sex drive has occasionally got you into trouble, maybe on the front page of National Enquirer or the
local paper, thank God for that he made you so sexy, along with your forbears.  Yes, thank 
God  for that's the reason you are here.  And not somewhere out there
in the midst of undifferentiated nothingness!
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Yes, thank God the good old smarts of homo sapiens  sapiens is often overuled by passion whereby folks are emboldened to say "Damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead!"
 

Filed under humor on Dec. 7, 2000
 

Actually the idea popped into my head while doing some serious thinking about the role of chance in the origin of life and its evolution on earth.
 

Apart from human sex urges, chance events operating at the atomic level of matter made it possible for inanimate molecules to build the first units of life, two or more billion years back.
And chance then provided the necessary further changes that allowed natural selection to
work and produce astounding bio-diversity.  Astounding, for say the experts, 99% of that diversity over billions of years has long gone extinct.
 

I fact, this whole post is to set you up for an introduction to  Kenneth R. Miller's recent book
Finding Darwin's God.  This gem of a book is a good cure against  mindless young-earth creationists who know not how the Bible was written and also against those arrogant experts on evolution who think the Infinite One  should vacate his universe, or even
fall on one of his zillion volt thunderbolts and let humans, especially scientists, determine what is really true and even what is right, wrong.  And, who should be really worshipped in this world.
 

Miller deals with specific creationists and atheist evolutionists and their theorys.  And, to
my mind, shows clearly why they are wrong.  In general, the creationists for not listening to Darwin and modern biologists on the fact of evolution operating over vast time periods.  Miller also hacks at evolutionists for claiming too much  - Daniel Dennett in his Darwin's Dangerous Idea  describes evolution as the corrosive fluid that over the last 150 years has eaten away at western civilization's most cherished cultural props - kiss God as creator goodbye.  Adios, to any real ultimate purpose, destiny or destination for life.  Dennett, Richard Dawkins and many other modern biologists clearly state if Darwin's evolution is true it necessarily means the death of God.  Christianity and most religions are doomed for they lead humans down a mythical garden path.
 

Says Miller, "Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin endoses  this view in so many words, and expicitly proclaims that it  should be part of a social program to transform human society.  As he puts it, when science speaks to the masses ..."
 
 

< quoting Lewontin >...the primary problem in not to provide the public with the knowledge of how far it is to the nearest star and what genes are made of, for that vast project is, in its entirety, hopeless.  Rather, the problems is to get them to reject irrational and supernatural explanations of the world, the demons that exist only in their imaginations, and to accept  a social and intellectual apparatus, Science, as the only begetter of truth. <end of quote>

<quoting Lewontin>
It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to creat an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.  Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.    end of quote>

Miller gives science its due.  And he realizes any valid doctrine of creation now has to incorporate not only evolution but chance (Quantum Theory).  First of all, chance makes life possible.  Furthermore, it is the ground of our freedom as moral agents, and allows us to be lovers of God i.e. we are animals, yes,  but human animals.  And not totally determined machines.
 

So, at the end of the day Ken Miller's criticisms and ideas will go a long way to help Christians  embrace (integrate into doctrine) Charles Darwin and his "corrosive" ideas.  Of course, a new God is emerging or evolving from all this.  A God who is truly Lord of all creation.  The everlasting Lord of stars, mountains, zebras, panda bears, tigers, chimps and humans.  And, it cannot be avoided, the Lord of chance and evolution.